cherry blossom is incredibly short lived in my z5 ... a couple days at best ... it was near done blooming when you bought it.. and the transplant finished it off for this season ... in my z5 the flower buds are incredibly sensitive to frost/freeze after winter.. and prior to bloom ... your annual show will vary based on such ... all you should be worried about .... is getting it to live thru summer.. and you should be all set .... where is two face.. TO THE BATCAVE.. lol .. ken

The low graft just means it will never get to be a very large tree at all. And you don't want to do any pruning at this time. Let the tree establish and develop. You should remove any shoots that appear below the graft and any top shoots that are growing in an unusual, outward or non-weeping pattern. But leave the lower branches/shoots in place for the time being as they help with establishment and trunk development. After a few years in the ground, you can gradually remove them from the the lowest point up to where the canopy really starts to develop. Not to rain on your parade but you should be aware that weeping flowering cherries - in fact, most flowering cherries - tend to be problematic trees in the PNW. Our climate seems to generate a lot of disease issues and weeping cherries/flowering cherries tend to have the lion's share. Keep on top of any problems, watch for rootstock shoots and enjoy your little tree for as long as it looks good and remains in good health.

Me, I would take it back, due to the extent of the damage, and how the tree looks. If they offer a guarantee until Nov., then they should honor it now. They get paid to baby plants, and you should be able to buy a healthy specimen. It IS possible that it got missed a time or two as who-ever was watering at the nursery ran down the rows of plants with the hose, and it got damaged that way. From the photos, it does look like it missed a few waterings. It should come back from it, but it may take a while and it may not be too attractive for a year or so. Just check over your next tree very carefully before you buy it and take it home, and look after it well once you get it there - if you think it's dry from the nursery, water it, and if it's pretty wet, leave it until it's dry. Plant it ASAP (dig the hole before you go to the nursery) and mulch it well - no deeper than 4", as wide as possible, at least 3', and no mulch in the 2-3" next to the trunk. Water it abour every other day for the first week or two, then taper off to once a week or so, as the roots begin to grow out of the root ball into the surrounding soil - a long, slow watering, so the ground gets soaked to the bottom of the root ball. Check if it needs watering by checking the first few inches of soil - if it's dry, water, and if it's still damp, wait another day or 2. You want to give it the equivalent of an inch of rain per week, so adjust your watering according to how much rain you get.

It is pretty easy. You only use is for certain types of trees that tend to get very hard, unyielding buds while in cold storage. Some of the varieties you use it for are oaks, redbuds, hackberries, weeping willows, birch, hawthorne, some types of dogwoods, barberries, and ornamental pears. When these trees are held in cold storage they sort of get "stuck" in dormancy and don't want to wake up. Often, if you plant these types of bare-root trees without sweating them, they stay in dormancy for months and, if they don't break dormancy at the right time after spring planting, they can die before the following spring rolls around. What you want to do by "sweating" them is to create a super-humid, moist environment that gives the buds extra "encouragement" to swell and break. You can sweat them in several ways. For example, if the trees came in a large cardboard box, you can take them out of it, line it with heavy plastic, and then put the trees back into it. If they have any packing material around their roots, remove any plastic and wet down that packing material throughoughly. Then use duct tape to seal up the large sheet of plastic and make it as air-tight as possible. Store the whole thing in moderate temperatures between 45 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit out of direct sun. Within a few hours, you should see condensation inside the plastic and that is what you want. It can take 1 to 2 weeks of sweating for the buds to swell and break. If your condensation gradually disappears, you may have to briefly open the plastic and wet down the packing material around the roots and then reseal it. Check the buds for signs of swelling every couple of days. Or, if you have a polyhouse or tightly constructed hoophouse or high tunnel that holds in the humidity well, you can wet down the roots and sweat them in that structure following the same principle of shielding them from direct sunlight and maintaining the right temperatures and high humidity. Or, you can lay the plants down on a garage or barn floor, remove any plastic from the trees root area and wet down the packing material around the roots, and cover up the whole thing with a sheet of heavy duty plastic or a tarp. It is a little harder to maintain humidity under the tarp though unless you lay it underneath the plants on the floor and sort of wrap it around the plants and seal it shut with duct tape.. Once you have swelling buds, the sweating has achieved its goal of breaking dormancy. The key to success with sweating is what you do after the sweating because the plants need to go into the ground when the weather is warm and humid--very similar conditions to their sweating period only the humidity is natural and not artificially mainatained under plastic. If you plant the trees and a late cold snap occurs, you can loose the dormancy-breaking effect unleashed by the sweating. So, you don't want to sweat trees until the weather is conducive to planting. And, as soon as the buds swell and you remove the plants from their sweating "area", you want to plant them ASAP. That's all you have to do to "sweat" a dormant tree.